Thursday, April 8, 2010

LinkedIn: Social networking for professionals

LinkedIn has carved itself a nice niche in the social networking space.
It’s not about posting status updates on your life (Facebook), sharing photos with friends (Flickr), connecting with your favorite bands (MySpace) or sharing your thoughts (Twitter).LinkedIn is the serious social networking site. It’s pretty much all business. Officially LinkedIn is about connecting with colleagues, customers and others to find jobs or make business contacts.
But I like LinkedIn for other reasons.
My LinkedIn profile is my professional face online. If people want to learn more about me, they can check out my LinkedIn page and see where I’ve worked before and where I went to school. There’s a link to my company’s Web page to check out my work. I’ve also added links to my personal blog and Twitter page so people can get to know me as a person, if they wish to do so.
LinkedIn is a good tool for promoting one’s professional brand.
I like how LinkedIn profiles are ranked highly on search engines like Google.
I use LinkedIn as my electronic Rolodex. It’s a great way for keeping track of people’s title changes and job changes. That’s a valuable tool for journalists.
With a profitable business and 65 million members worldwide, it should be no surprise that LinkedIn is preparing to go public, according to Bloomberg.

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About Me

I'm a technology business journalist who covers personal computers, consumer electronics and video games. This is my personal site. The views expressed here are solely my own. I enjoy movies, music, popular culture, electronic gadgets and the news media.
I can be reached at patseitz@gmail.com.